Reed Farrel Coleman writes elegantly about damaged people who live in a sharp-edged world.

Author of more than 20 novels, Coleman is a former executive vice president of the Mystery Writers of America and the winner of the Macavity and Shamus Awards. His accomplishments have earned him a strong fan base that is likely to grow with his new book of crime fiction, “Where It Hurts,” which depicts an appealingly dark and atmospheric world.

Q: You published your first novel in your mid-to-late 30s. What did you do before then?
A: I grew up in the Coney Island/Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. I started writing poetry at 13 or 14, and I was pretty good at it. I went to Brooklyn College but, as most poets do, I had a day job. My job out of college was working as a freight forwarder at the JFK Airport in Queens, someone who arranges inanimate objects to get from place A to place B. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Goodfellas,” you know the people I worked with.

Q: Brooklyn, or Brooklyn College, also prompted your interest in crime fiction.
A: Yeah, I went back to Brooklyn College, and the only class that fit my schedule was a class in American Detective Fiction. I considered myself more of a literary and poetry kind of a guy, but after a few weeks in the class and reading “Farewell, My Lovely,” “The Continental Op” and “The Maltese Falcon,” I told my wife: “This is what all the poetry training was for. This is what I was meant to do.”